Hands up! Black humor predominates on the latest ‘Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov’

Times are grim in international relations as every reader of these pages knows well. But allow me to assure you that Russia’s chattering classes are NOT wrapping themselves in bedsheets and slowly walking to the cemetery in advance of some hypothetical preemptive nuclear strike on their country. i.e. they are not preparing for eternity any time soon. No, they are likely ensconced in armchairs with mugs of beer in their hands while they enjoy the black humor delivered to them by the country’s most widely watched talk show host, Vladimir Solovyov.

Like every news program on Russian state television yesterday, the Solovyov show gave ample coverage to Vladimir Putin’s s speech in Astana, Kazakhstan before fellow heads of state of what were once Soviet republics and are now members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the sense of which the BBC almost gets right when it calls the CSTO Russia’s NATO. Putin spoke about Russia’s military might and about what he can do using the Oreshnik hypersonic intermediate range ballistic missile to utterly destroy the Kiev regime should they continue to launch French, British and American rockets into Russian territory. His listeners smiled politely, though, surely, he was scaring the living daylights out of them all. For the home audience in Moscow, on the other hand, his very tough speech was music to the ears of his countrymen. At last, they were witnessing ‘Putin Unbound.’ Both Solovyov and his panelists used the moment to let off steam and to enjoy a good laugh in what has to be described as black humor.

Political commentator Sergei Mikheev, a regular on the show, set the tone when he said how pleased he was that Putin was moving away from the Soviet style diplomatic language which had proven to be so unproductive in dealing with the leaders of today’s Collective West. He was now speaking in the only manner that those folks understand: frontal assault. What Russia should be saying to the West now that its superiority in weapons had been demonstrated for all to see via the Oreshnik attack on Dnepropetrovsk is simply: ‘Hands Up!’

Others joined in with similar contributions, including:

“Our opening lines to Berlin should be: ‘you have three hours to evacuate the city before we demolish it!’”

and

“To the Brits, who seem to be suffering extraordinarily from their loss of empire: ‘We’ll put you out of your misery!’”

*****

Jokes aside, the feeling of the panelists on this show and the mood of the weekly news wrap-up hosted by Dmitry Kiselyov a couple of hours earlier was that there is no need for negotiations with anyone to end the war in and about Ukraine. Russia is smashing its way to total victory, the enemy lines will collapse under the overwhelming pressure of the ongoing offensive, and Russia will get what it wants in the act of capitulation that whoever is left to speak for Ukraine signs.

In this scenario, a role for Donald Trump in ending the war and the American notion of the outcome as a ‘frozen conflict’ in which Zelensky cedes land in exchange for NATO membership – all of this is trashed by the Russian side.

You will note that the Russian programming yesterday was wholly focused on the war on the front lines of Donbas and in the Kursk region. To my knowledge, there was no coverage of the feats of Russian arms that appeared on the Times of India’s youtube channel yesterday, namely the destruction of a trainload of freshly arrived ATACMS and Storm Shadows in the Odessa region, or of the similarly reported Russian assassination of the main leader of rebel forces occupying Aleppo in Syria. None of this has yet been announced by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Indeed, the entire issue of threat to the survival of the Bashar Assad regime in Syria was not covered yesterday by Russia’s main news channels. In short, there was nothing to spoil the fun over ‘Putin Unbound’.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024